The Year of Code was always going to carry politics

Learning to code is not the problem, the principles this new scheme embodies might be. As with any science and technology education project, we must recognise the politics so we might steer them wisely.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne meets students at the the launch of the 'Year of Code' campaign. Photograph: Oli Scarff/PA

Just over a week ago,
the Year of Code initiative was announced with fanfare, with the aim introducing coding into the UK schools curriculum.

On the surface, the project appeared to tick all the right boxes around technology and education: a timely cause to fill a growing skills gaps, a high-ranking advisory board fronted by a young woman, and a lump of £500k of money. The initiative’s sleek yellow website featured a video of a young tech CEO in his ‘Tech City’ office in Google Campus; founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales; and a chirpy George Osborne talking about how learning to code would help young people to “understand more about the world around them, and that’s what education is all about”.

Yet within six days, the wheels appeared coming off the project and skidding into the path of oncoming vehicles. Lottie Dexter, the Executive Director of ‘Year of Code’, received
a mauling from Jeremy Paxman after it emerged that she herself could not actually code. A couple of days later Emma Mulqueeny, the founder of
Young Rewired State and one of the ‘Year of Code’ board members quit, penning
a scathing blogpost outlining her reasons for doing so. What went wrong?

Systems of education, and science and technology each carry their own individual politics, and when combined the mixture is particularly volatile. Debates around the teaching of
evolution,
climate change, and
sex education highlight how social, political, moral and cultural factors are embedded in and shape if and how science is presented in the classroom. Code carries all of this and more so, being tied up with other forms of professional education wherein the learning is intrinsically tied up with some form of future employment which raises its own questions: which jobs? Which employers?

Vocational training in the sciences is nothing new. Shortly before Year of Code launched, the Wellcome Library
released over 100,000 images from its collection, many of which depicted the history of young people’s involvement in processes around science and technology. In amidst the less fortunate – child labour in the mines and the factories (which of course still exists) - are the apprentices who worked with apothecaries and alchemists to learn their trade. Boys, sometimes as young as 12, were ‘bound’ by their parents or guardians to a master apothecary for
up to eight years (pdf) during which time they would be instructed in chemistry, botany, and the tools and techniques of the trade, and examined at the end of their tenure. The utility of these studies was tethered closely to the utility that they would bring their master, with the process overseen by the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries as a way of fixing the status of their profession by ensuring that the next generation were suitably trained.

Means of learning about emergent and cutting edge technologies also took place in community groups, before they were able to be integrated into more formalized systems of education. In the early days of wireless telegraphy, boy scout clubs experimented with amateur radios, having identified the technology’s potential in ‘co-ordinating the movement of distant campers’, with the Boy Scout Association introducing the ‘Wireless Merit Badge’ in 1919 for those demonstrating proficiency. Like the apothecary assistants before them, this education served a vocational purpose, but also one which carried its own direction and – yes – politics. In 1914, the U.S. Army Signal Corp established a class to teach the scouts about various aspects of wireless, including “
destruction of wire systems of the enemy” (pdf); and, following the First World War, the military set up the Radio Amateur Bureau to turn local boy scout troups, armed with their own encryption keys, into reception points for important Morse Code messages which they would decipher and pass on.

As the context in which learning how to build and man a radio receiver affects its use and its user, so too does the setting in which learning to code takes place. Critics of the Year of Code scheme noted that, despite George Osborne’s entreaty of the personal and social good of education, the program seemed targeted more towards industry needs and a rhetoric of economic growth as highlighted by the fact that
the majority of the advisory board came from the private sector and, like Lottie Dexter, many had no technical backgrounds themselves. Dexter herself was a founder of the Million Jobs Fund, a group which advocated
scrapping the Jobs Tax for under-25s; and had previously worked at the
Centre for Social Justice, the think-tank set up by Ian Duncan-Smith.

Technologist
Adrian Short argued that these factors meant that the scheme represented a neo-liberal agenda, which trained “children to have ‘relevant’ employer-friendly skills and the right attitudes and politics to go with them. All social concerns are subordinated to a particular kind of economic settlement.” By contrast,
Mulqueeny viewed the enterprise as being pre-engineered to fail, stating that ““£500k is a balls amount of money, matched with a 24 year old PR girl sent out to ‘mauling by media’ XFactor style, is this government’s way of kicking this subject into the long grass for good.”

2014 is the Year of the Wooden Horse and, appropriately, one of the accusations made by Short against ‘Year of Code’ was that it was itself a Trojan horse for bringing unpleasant politics into schools. Those criticising the initiative argue that learning to code is not the problem, but the principles that the scheme embodies and the choices it enables. Invocations to ‘learn to code’ already carries such magical and hyperbolic rhetoric, as the satirical ‘Dear Miss Disruption’ column illustrates, that any education scheme around it will carry its own politics. Identifying the purpose of STEM education means asking questions about what is being taught, by whom, and to what end; not so much to question the presence of a wooden horse, but to ask which direction it is heading in, and whether it can be steered.

Georgina Voss was awarded her PhD in technology and innovation management from SPRU, University of Sussex, and is currently a Resident at Lighthouse Studios. On Twitter she is @gsvoss